To some readers, reporter Jim Wasserman is a home wrecker.
That’s what happens when you chronicle the downturn in what was previously the hottest thing going: the go-go residential real estate market.
For a while there, it seemed like there was no end to the exuberance.
Year after year, steep increases in home values became so common they were considered normal and were fodder for a steady output of headlines and stories heralding the rise.
Talk of home appreciation and gains in equity made for real estate heaven. It was Topic A of conversation at neighborhood parties and get-togethers from San Francisco to San Diego.
Did you hear about Joe down the street? He sold his house the first day it was on the market and there were so many offers, he got more than his asking price.
Hallelujah. Call the appraiser.
When someone said “flipper,” they weren’t talking about fish. Bay Area transplants gobbling up homes and property from the Sierra foothills and Elk Grove to Roseville and El Dorado Hills became “equity refugees.”
It was a ubiquitous tale, a quintessential California story, the new gold rush.
And it was too good to last and, of course, it didn’t.
The market has tanked. Prices continue to slide, inventories of homes for sale are at or near record levels and new home construction has stalled.
The industry — from real estate agents and developers to home sellers and mortgage lenders — is spooked.
And The Bee’s storyteller of this falling market is Wasserman, a veteran reporter who most recently worked for the Associated Press in Sacramento before hiring on at the paper as a business writer about a year and a half ago.
“I’m trying to sell my home and your articles are not helping (us) sellers,” one woman said in an e-mail she sent Wasserman on Aug. 17, the day he wrote a front-page story that carried the headline “Area’s home prices decline. Sacramento County’s drop is steepest in state; sales also fall.”
“Thanks for eating away a large portion of my equity!!!”
“For many people, he is blamed for the market tanking,” said Wasserman’s editor Wayne Davis, who finds such notions ludicrous. “He gets the brunt of the heat and he gets verbally abused. But there’s nothing you can do but write the best stories you can.”
One new home builder told Wasserman that buyers have come into his company’s sales offices, newspaper in hand, and cancelled their purchase contracts, pointing to a Wasserman story about the housing slump.
There are readers who accuse him of being a tool of the real estate industry and of catering to the paper’s major real estate advertisers when he writes about a bright spot in the market.
Some say he is obviously a landlord seeking to drive up rents. Others call him a renter bent on ruining the sales market so he can buy a home as prices drop.
(For the record, he owns a home in Elk Grove.)
So what does Wasserman say about all this?
He understands acutely that people are passionate about the subject. “I know so many people have a stake in this. … For most it is the biggest financial transaction they will ever do. … We have a lot of responsibility to get the tone right.”
I think the paper has done just that via a prolific output of stories by Wasserman that not only cite the straightforward statistics of home sales and prices but which also explain those numbers in a broader context.
A look at the record shows an array and range of stories.
The coverage includes articles about the various theories behind the slump; how some homeowners are still able to sell their homes quickly; how other homeowners are turning to auctions; the rise in default notices; forecasts for the downturn to continue in 2007; the risky mortgage financing burdening some homeowners, and many more.
The coverage has been superb in the quality of ideas, in the quantity of stories and in the reporting and writing. Many voices are heard, not just those of industry experts and economists.
The stories have been a hit at sacbee.com, where dozens of readers weigh in with comments, making them among the most popular online. The debate among readers is extraordinary and is often intense, personal, chatty and catty.
Wasserman, who took over the housing/real estate beat in April, reads the comments regularly. It helps him, he says, get the views of “real people” and he has used some of the information to add context to his stories.
Wasserman and Davis said they are very conscious of how the beat is covered and that they talk through every story to make sure it isn’t unduly negative.
“We always ask ourselves, are we being too negative?” Wasserman said. “We bend over backward to have the right tone. We will add another sentence of context to put it in the right perspective.”
Said Davis: “We don’t like to do stories just on the numbers. We do them, of course, but they are snapshots. We move away as quickly as we can and look for other ways to tell the story.”
Not surprisingly, Wasserman, who has covered politics and worked at the Fresno Bee for 14 years, says he’s never had such reader reaction. “It’s much more response than anything I’ve ever done. I wasn’t expecting it.”
Both he and Davis find it amusing that at the height of the housing boom, no one called to complain about the coverage.
“Those people who blame us today,” said Davis, “they didn’t call a year and a half ago to tell us we were driving up the market.”
